One thing I love about the work I do is that it gives me contact with a wide range of leaders. I especially enjoy the opportunity to learn from those whose commitment, drive, and intelligence result in the kind of great leadership we all want to emulate.
They’re a wide-ranging group, but there are a few traits that many of good leaders share. Here’s one near the top of the list: They are masters of delegation.
As the holidays approach, we’re always reminded of what may be the worst boss of all time: Ebenezer Scrooge of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol. So tightfisted that his name has come to be a synonym for a miser, Scrooge pays the lowest wages, provides the worst working conditions, requires the longest hours—even at Christmas!—refuses to give to charity, and is deeply unpleasant. Pre-redemption, Scrooge must have been a lot for even the saintly Bob Cratchit to bear.
If you’re like most good leaders, you work hard to put together the best possible team. Finding not just the right skills but the right person—someone who’s productive, knowledgeable, and a good fit with your other team members and organizational culture—is a gratifying experience.
But whether your dream team is fully in place or still a work in progress, it’s important to remember that retaining great staffers is at least as important as recruiting them. Not only is turnover hard on employee morale and short-term capacity, but searches, hires, and onboarding are time-consuming and expensive processes. And there’s always an element of risk when you bring in someone new.
Recently it was family movie night at the Kingsley house. We decided to watch Disney’s Big Hero 6, which had just won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film.
Aside from being entertaining—which almost goes without saying for a Disney film—Big Hero 6 has some great leadership messages for children. Science is not just a positive force but a cool pursuit, and education and good thinking ultimately solve major problems. The group of brainy young heroes is racially diverse and includes girls as well as boys.
How do you continue developing as a leader in the midst of the holiday rush?
You’ve worked hard to develop leadership skills and the results are starting to show. Now the holidays are approaching, and along with wood fires, sugar cookies, and a plethora of pumpkin and apple spiced edibles, you’re encountering rushed deadlines, overbooked calendars, and a flood of emails to your inbox.
But you can keep your leadership development momentum by challenging yourself to accomplish at least one of these four, right-now hacks:
Leaders never wake up thinking, “Today I’ll frustrate my team!” And yet so many times as the work day progresses, that’s exactly what happens.
Whether it’s through long meetings with no clear goal, assigning a project with a stressfully short deadline, or not clearly communicating their plan, leaders have been guilty of frustrating the very people who make up their support system.
To look at it another way, they are eroding their own foundation when they frustrate the people they work with. While working on leadership development, you must be mindful of the things that you do that bring frustration to your team.